Gadgetory

this is dan Seifert with the verge and we're here in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress and we're checking out the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 right now you note 8 is the latest member of Samsung's Galaxy Note family and obviously by its name it's got an 8 inch display which kind of sits in between the note 2 and the note 10.1 which have been previously released for specs wise it's got a 1280 by 800 pixel display it's pretty thin it's only about seven point nine five millimeters so it's under 8 millimeters thin and it's really light in your hand of course it is all plastic as many Samsung devices are it's kind of got that glossy typical Samsung finish on the back here we've got a 5 megapixel camera well up front there's a 1.2 megapixel camera the device is powered by a quad-core Samsung Exynos processor clocked at 1.6 gigahertz and it's got 2 gig to gigabytes of RAM and Samsung's gonna be offering this in 16 or 32 gigabyte versions of course since it is a Galaxy Note it comes with S Pen functionality which you can access with the s-pen digitizer here what is new about this is that you can use the S Pen on the hardware keys which you couldn't do on the older Note devices so that's new for the Galaxy Note 8 a couple of other things are new software wise Samsung is bundling the awesome note software which is a note-taking software that it's been pretty popular on iOS this is the first time it's on Android and Samsung is including it with the note 8 for free so the other new feature here is the ability to hover over content when you're using a third-party app the first time app that's optimized for that is this Flipboard app that's been optimized to be able to show you headlines while you just hover the pen over the device without having to click into it Samsung says it's going to bring this to other apps in the future the other unique part of the hardware here is an infrared blaster on the side samsung has included a version of the peel software so that you can control your home entertainment center and television using the IR remote on the side of the device it's the same software that's HTC is actually using for its sense TV product on the new HTC one device the note 8.0 also features samsung dual view feature which we saw on the note 10.1 and also on the note 2 it's much less lag with the note 8.0 in this mode then we saw with the note 10.1 so it seems that Samsung has improved the software greatly here samsung isn't quoting a battery life for the note 8 but it is saying that there's a 4600 million about our battery included typically most companies say that will last about a day but we'll have to see wow this runs when we actually get a tester unit in for review the Galaxy Note 8 international version can actually make phone calls so you can see it's got an earpiece here and there's a microphone at the bottom so if you really wanted to you could use this as a calling device with the 3g equipped model samsung is also going to be releasing a Wi-Fi version and an LTE version the company says that the note 8.0 will be available by the end of the second quarter this year but it's not yet talking price and we don't exactly know the final specs for the US version